PATHWAYS

As we bring you stories across Manly, the program is organised into pathways or themes to help you navigate the Festival. Each pathway brings together sessions with shared themes or interests, but they’re not meant to be followed from start to finish.

They’re simply a way to explore what’s on offer, mix and match sessions, and create your own Festival experience.

The program also encourages you to choose your pathway across subject areas, genres, sessions, venues, formats, private stories, and public life.

Australia In the World

Conversations about global conflict, diplomacy and disorder, exploring Australia’s place inan unsettled international landscape through policy, lived experience and creative response.

Sessions

Country and Who We Are

Sessions that explore how place, history, culture and inheritance shape identity, belonging and the stories Australians tell about themselves.

Sessions

Living Today

Sessions that grapple with the pressures, choices and contradictions of contemporary life, from money, housing and masculinity to faith, family and sport as lived culture.

Sessions

Personal Reckonings

Intimate conversations about lives shaped by loss, break-up, belief and moral choice, where private experience meets wider questions of meaning, responsibility and resilience.

Sessions

Power, Truth and Accountability

Sessions that examine how power operates, how truth is contested or concealed, and what accountability looks like when institutions, systems and leaders are tested.

Sessions

So, You Want to be a Writer?

Practical sessions and workshops for aspiring and emerging writers, focused on craft, process, publishing and the realities of turning writing into a finished work.

Sessions

Stories and Storytellers

Conversations about how stories are told, shaped and received across contemporary, literary, historical, romance, spy thrillers and crime fiction, exploring voice, genre, memory and imagination.

Sessions